Sometimes you wonder how an idea flowers into a premiere. Victory Gardens production of Queen left a number of us in the audience pondering that question. The play’s concept couldn’t be more noble. Highlighting the global disappearance of bees, it followed the journey of two scientists whose groundbreaking work explaining that disappearance become suspect. If they ignore the contradictory data to fit the model they’ve spent years cultivating, they’ll be rock stars. Published, respected, and vindicated.
Parts of the play are highly technical which adds credence to the playwrights research and her commitment to scientific specificity and integrity. Priya Monhanty as the quantitative wiz Sanam Shah nailed the cloistered nerd rabidly committed to her data and its integrity. Darci Nalepa as Ariel Spiegel, the field expert who sacrificed the companionship of her baby’s daddy to prove a Monsanto pesticide was causing the decimation of a critical species delivered a solid performance as well. A relief was needed from all of this gravity and it arrived in the form of Arvid Patel’ played by Adam Ross. A quasi arranged love interest to Mohanty’s character, Sanam, he was cool, glib and often riotously funny as he did his woo thing. A crazy mash up of Super Fly and a baby Warren Buffett made him wonderfully ingratiating.
If only the whole play could have maintained a bit more of that vitality. Queen was thought provoking. The ultimate hope was that we would gain more insight into substantive causes for the alarming plunge in the bee population or glean a whiff of hope about their recovery. Neither really manifested. Instead the side stories prevailed. One centered on the fallacy of scientific ethical integrity while the other dissected the decomposition of a friendship over those same ethical issues. It worked well enough. You left with a better understanding of the sacrifices people who dedicate their lives to research make to find answers to extraordinarily difficult questions. That in itself could be reason enough to reserve a seat and watch this cautionary tale unfurl.
Victory Garden
Apr 14 – May 14
$20 – 60
